US drones over Baghdad as Iraq fights for Tikrit

AFP, BAGHDAD

Displaced Iraqis from the village of Mansuriya in Diyala Province north of Baghdad, where extremist violence has been raging, sit on the side of a road on Friday on the way to the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, where they want to take refuge.

Photo: AFP

The US military has started flying armed drones over Baghdad to defend US troops and diplomats as Iraqi forces took their fight against Sunni insurgents to the strategic militant-held city of Tikrit.

Iraq’s top Shiite cleric urged the country’s leaders to unite, after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki conceded political measures are needed to defeat the offensive that has killed more than 1,000 people and overrun major parts of five provinces.

In further fallout, the president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region said there was no going back on his ethnic group’s self-rule in disputed territory, including the divided northern oil city Kirkuk, now defended against the militants by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

International agencies also raised alarm bells over the humanitarian consequences of the fighting, with up to 10,000 people having fled a northern Christian town in recent days and 1.2 million displaced by unrest in Iraq this year. The International Organization for Migration said that aid workers could not reach tens of thousands of Iraqis displaced by the violence, and called for humanitarian corridors to be established.

A senior US official said “a few” armed drones were being used over Baghdad as a precaution to safeguard Americans in the Iraqi capital if necessary.

However, officials said the drones would not be used for offensive strikes against the Sunni Arab militant offensive — led by extremists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — but involving other groups as well.

The Pentagon acknowledged that among the manned and unmanned aircraft flying over Iraq to carry out surveillance, some were carrying bombs and missiles — without specifying if those planes were drones.

“The reason that some of those aircraft are armed is primarily for force protection reasons, now that we have introduced into the country some military advisers whose objective will be to operate outside the confines of the embassy,” Pentagon spokesman US Navy Rear Admiral John Kirby said.

Al-Maliki insisted that “Baghdad is safe.”

A retired US general, James Conway, echoed those remarks, saying that “the worst is over,” as militants are thought to be unable to take Baghdad, the south or Kurdish areas.

In Tikrit, Iraqi forces have swooped into Tikrit University by helicopter. A police major reported periodic clashes there on Friday.

A senior army officer said Iraqi forces were targeting militants in Tikrit with air strikes to protect forces at the university and prepare for an assault on the hometown of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

Another senior officer said taking the university was an important step toward regaining control of Tikrit, which the militants seized on June 11.

The operation is the latest effort to regain the initiative after security forces wilted in the face of the initial insurgent onslaught launched on June 9.

Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud Barzani said that Baghdad could no longer object to Kurdish self-rule in Kirkuk and other towns from which federal forces withdrew in the face of the militant advance.

“Now, this [issue]... is achieved,” he said, referring to a constitutional article meant to address the Kurds’ decades-old ambition to incorporate the territory in their autonomous region in the north over the objections of successive governments in Baghdad.